I posted the following text (with one typo now corrected) to a Christmas Eve post titled “Subversive Can Openers” at John Morehead’s blog today at 6:43 p.m. (U.S. Eastern Time): Continue reading
Author Archives: Ron Henzel
The Thick Fog & Lamp-Post Syndrome
As I started reading J.P. Kenyon’s Stuart England (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1978), and I came across a remark that seems applicable to the state into which scholarship on the Apostle Paul has fallen since the various New Perspectives became influential. Continue reading
Faith Seeking Understanding
I feel bad. It’s the kind of feeling I get when I try to join a conversation already in process by interjecting a remark that turns out to be entirely inappropriate because I missed something that was said earlier. It’s embarrassing. Even worse is the feeling I get when I start asking questions to get myself caught up on the subject of the conversation and others become impatient because they’re eager to take the discussion to the next level, not waste time bringing me up to speed. Sometimes I try to to camouflage my faux pas behind a wisecrack, but more often I just shut up and listen, hoping for a few understandable crumbs to fall from the table of their esoteric dialogue. In either case it’s painfully (to me, at least) obvious that something has been going on—something essential to the conversation—that I missed, and that my attempt to fit in demonstrated that I had not first acquired the necessary background. Continue reading
emerging conversation
I started a new blog this morning called “Emerging Conversation” in which I’m trying to initiate a conversation about the Emerging Church. I realize that there’s an awful lot on the Web about this subject, but that fact only highlights the challenge: where does one begin? Is there primary text, or a canon of literature I may consult? I’ve also noticed that much of the material on the Net is of a contentious nature. And I understand that some of that contention has also been committed to print. While I’ve never been one to avoid a good debate, in the spirit of Renaissance humanism (Ad fontes! — “To the sources!”) I think I should first familiarize myself with what the emerging movers and shakers are actually saying and doing before expressing any opinion of my own. And since this emergence has been going on for some time, it will probably take a while before I feel qualified to have an opinion, which, when I finally get it, I hope to express in a loving spirit.
Meanwhile, as I was going about the business of setting up this new blog, my first choice for a name was “Emerging Church,” but apparently that one is already taken (even though there currently doesn’t appear to be an actual blog at that blogspot sub-domain). So then I chose “Emergent Church,” though little did I know that someone had actually already started blogging there—over a year ago, however, which is probably why Blogger.com allowed me to usurp that sub-domain and start blogging right over the previous posts. I discovered this fact accidentally, and truly regretted defacing someone else’s work, no matter how neglected it may have been. So I suppose this is a lesson to all of us who use Blogger: don’t allow your blogs to sit idle for too many months if you expect to keep them. In the end I didn’t like the name, and if I don’t delete it I may use it as a place to store interesting citations from Emerging Church literature.
free country
Last night, as I was preparing to read chapter 4 of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to Ben, I noticed that he was watching a particularly dark episode of some cop profiler drama, and I registered my disapproval with Wendy. Ben entered the discussion with his usual flair, objecting to our efforts to circumscribe his TV viewing, with his climactic line being, “This is a free country! I have my rights!”
He’s only seven. Where does he get this stuff?
“Apologetics for Postmoderns”
Douglas Groothius, Ph.D., professor of philosophy at Denver Seminary, wrote:
If a Christian apologist of postmodernist stripe were to stand on our equivalent of Mars Hill today, he or she might say something to this effect, something quite different in spirit from the apostle Paul’s original address (Acts 17:16-31).
People of Postmodernity, I can see you speak in many language games and are interested in diverse spiritualities. I have observed your pluralistic religious discourse and the fact that you use many final vocabularies. I have seen your celebration of the death of objective truth and the eclipse of metanarratives, and I declare to you that you are right. As one of your own has said, “We are suspicious of all metanarratives.” What you have already said, I will reaffirm with a slightly different spin.
We have left modernity behind as a bad dream. We deny its rationalism, objectivism and intellectual arrogance. Instead of this, we affirm the Christian community, which professes that God is the strand that unites our web of belief. We have our own manner of interpreting the world and using language that we call you to adopt for yourself. We give you no argument for the existence of God, since natural theology is simply rationalistic hubris. We are not interested in metaphysics but in discipleship.
For us, Jesus is Lord. That is how we speak. We act that way, too; it’s important to us. And although we cannot appeal to any evidence outside our own communal beliefs and tradition, we believe that God is in control of our narrative. We ask you to join our language game. Please. Since it is impossible to give you any independent evidence for our use of language, or to appeal to hard facts, we simply declare this to be our truth. It can become your truth as well, if you join up. Jesus does not call you to believe propositions but to follow him. You really can’t understand what we’re talking about until you join up. But after that, it will be much clearer. Trust us. In our way of speaking, God is calling everyone everywhere to change his or her language game, to appropriate a new discourse and to redescribe reality one more time. We speak such that the resurrection of Jesus is the crucial item in our final vocabulary. We hope you will learn to speak that way as well.
—Douglas Groothius, Truth Decay: Defending Christianity Against the Challenge of Postmodernism, (Downers Grove, IL, USA and Leicester, England: InterVarsity Press, 2002), 161-162.
Our Life Is But a Span 